a poster girl with no poster staying on the safe side of the road less travelled.

tenho saudades tuas

to painfully enjoy longing, to recognize and cherish the ache of someone or something that is beyond one’s grasp.

Saudade (singular) or saudades (plural) (pronounced [sɐ.uˈdaðɨ] or [sawˈdaðɨ] in European Portuguese,[1] [sa.uˈda.d(ʒ)ɪ] or [sawˈda.d(ʒ)ɪ] in Brazilian Portuguese[2] and [sawˈda.de] in Galician) is a Portuguese and Galician word for a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return.

Saudade has been described as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist … a turning towards the past or towards the future”.[3] A stronger form of saudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing. It may also be translated as a deep longing or yearning for something which does not exist or is unattainable.

Saudade was once described as “the love that remains” or “the love that stays” after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone ( e.g., one’s children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends) or something (e.g., places, pets, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. In Portuguese, ‘tenho saudades tuas’, translated as ‘I have saudades of you’ means ‘I miss you’, but carries a stronger tone.